It’s Saturday morning, and Norwich City is being so drastically outplayed by Tottenham that I just can’t bear to watch anymore. I haven’t seen something get hammered this efficiently on Canadian television since This Old House went off the air. It’s so bad that I would rather do math problems. In Friday’s edition of The Province newspaper, Whitecaps beat writer Marc Weber did a fantastic piece chronicling the misfortunes of one Duncan Nicol. Duncan, a passionate Caps fan who can often be found pitch-side with his camera at home games, has been to an incredible TWENTY away matches for Whitecaps FC. To date, he has not seen a win. The title of the piece was “The Unluckiest Fan.” This got me thinking: how unlucky is Duncan? Anyone who watches Vancouver with regularity knows that they are shit on the road. And not just any shit, we’re talking about the kind of intense coiler that Sigi Schmid drops pre-game after his 37th pie.

Without knowing which 20 games Duncan has attended, it’s impossible to do anything detailed like calculating the home winning percentage of the opponents he’s seen. That makes my job somewhat easier. The Whitecaps, in their MLS history, are 5W-12D-30L on the road. That’s a 10.64% chance of winning any given road game. (The road record of all MLS teams this year, for reference, is 58W-67D-136L, for a 22.2% chance of winning.) For these calculations, I needed the inverse, or the chances of the Whitecaps not winning on the road, which are 89.36%.

Calculating what the average person should witness is a simple matter. 10.64% * 20 games = ~2 wins. I wanted to go a little more in depth. What are the odds of selecting 20 games that don’t contain a win out of the 47 total games? I tried to figure this out myself, but I got quite lost in the formulas. So I turned to betting calculators. There’s nothing like the never-ending struggle to game the casinos to generate handy tools like streak calculators. As it turns out, Duncan isn’t really all that unlucky! He’s just a lot more dedicated than the rest of you stay-at-home fans. In a set of 47 games, with a non-winning percentage of 89.36%, the chances of a streak of 20 occurring are a rather good 39.74%.

So chin up, Duncan. As it turns out, the only reason you don’t have company in the 20 Games, No Wins club is because there aren’t very many fans who can afford to go to 20 away games in three years! I ran a couple more numbers, just to see what the future might look like for poor Duncan. He’s planning on going to Montreal and Seattle away in the coming weeks, so he’s going to knock some points off of that probability. His chances of witnessing 22 consecutive non-wins out of 50 games is only 33%. By May of next year, if he keeps on his current rate of travel, he’ll likely be down below a 30% probability! Keep it up, Duncan. It’s sure to happen for you some day.